One of Windows Vista’s new features is parental controls, allowing parents to manage what their children can do on the computer, and back in March 2006, Microsoft announced Windows Live Family Safety Settings to complement the controls that Vista offers.
Among features announced in the Family Safety offering is contact management for Messenger:
Parents will be able to create “allow” lists for communication services to help prevent their children from crossing paths with unknown contacts. The allow list will also help parents restrict access to a child’s personal blog or social networking page to only those contacts they have approved.
We haven’t yet seen contact management in FSS, but a new site called Live and Beyond has posted claiming that the feature will be ready very soon. Since the Windows Live Messenger 8.1 beta recently came to a close, we may see contact management in version 9.0. On second thought, I’m betting the capabilities for this are already in Windows Live Messenger 8.1, but just not active yet (server side configuration).